Concerns about Elementalist

Comments

I'll be focusing mostly on some skill tweaks since I've seen plenty of core trait suggestions in comments, as well as some linked threads. I'll also exclude sword since it's quite popular topic in any pvp discussion about ele. Most of the suggestions here dont have specific game mode context, they should apply everywhere, unless stated otherwise.

Staff
Most of the skills are too slow for what they do. There's too many channels, after-cast animations, long delays.

Lava font needs its damage reverted and casting animation removed (replace it with 0,5 second cast time or just make it instant). Cooldown could also be reverted back to 8 seconds. Alternatively, cooldown can stay the same,but persisting flames will need to have different effect instead of +2 sec duration, to avoid more power creep in PvE. A good example which has a lot of synergy with many builds (in any game mode) and skills would be adding 1 stack of burning per second on every fire field. Additionally, it should pulse burning as well, just like every other fire field (took me a while to notice).

Burning retreat could remove movement impairing conditions like similar skills on other classes.

Meteor shower should be more reliable. In current WvW situation it's the only source of damage and it's pretty easy to miss it due to long channel time. I feel like it's too impactful skill for any game mode, considering it's a weapon skill. My suggestion would be reducing all of it's numbers down: cast time to 2 seconds (at most), duration to 5 seconds (at most), number of hits to ~15, radius can be a bit smaller too. The goal is to make it more reliable to hit (all game modes) and make it less risky while keeping rather same damage over extended periods of time. Smaller radius also means that it's less RNG dependent in PvE which is easier to balance.

Ice spike could use slightly shorted delay.

Geyser is also a bit too slow. 2-3 second duration would be much better (with same total healing output).

Healing rain has too huge cooldown for what it does. Cooldown could be reduced to ~30, target cap could go up to 10 (big aoes on other classes already do - time warp, banners, spirits, winds of disenchantment). It doesnt heal much, but 3 cleanses on 10 people sounds pretty good with all condies thrown around since PoF.

Chain lightning projectiles should be a bit faster (travel speed, not cast time).

Static field needs its radius reverted to 240. In addition it could stun all enemies when it (dis)appears to make it more relevant CC in PvE. To not make it broken in other modes, players should only get stunned once by it, whether it's initial stun, stun on walking inside it, or stun while staying in it when it disappears (although this seems to be the case already).

Stoning should either be some kind of aoe (like slower version of icebow 3 for example) or have additional damage through bleeding, it's pretty bad auto attack currently.

Eruption has way too big delay on top of big cast time. Total duration shouldn be longer than 2 seconds with current damage/condition output.

Magnetic aura could use 5 second lower cooldown, staff doesnt have many defenses.

Shock wave is too slow and too weak, especially for skill 5. One of the buffs would be adding a stack or two of bleeding, removing target cap (or making it 10) and making the skill unblockable. Although that might be a bit too strong in large scale WvW, so immob would either need to be reduced to 1 second or skill would need to be reworked completely. Another idea is to make it work like scourge torch 5 skill where targets get immobilized after small delay if they dont escape the aoe.

Dual skills

Pressure blast: glorified fireball on 15 second cooldown. Travel speed is too slow, base heal is too low. Generally it's a good concept, but very unreliable. I've seen somewhere suggestion to make it ground-based piercing projectile (like gust and shock wave) which heals/damages+blinds once per hit.

Plasma blast is a bit too slow and hitbox seems broken, most of the time it doesnt hit downed players. It should also apply burn on hit, like other plasma skills.

Pyroclastic blast shouldnt be a projectile at all. It should either spawn like lava font or like meteor. It barely has an impact outside of PvE.

Lahar could have 2/3 stacks of vulnerability per pulse in addition to previous effects.

Pile driver could use some tweaks. Either remove root or make it unblockable (although both would be nice to have). Piercing part is rather useless since hitbox is quite small, so it very rarely hits more than one enemy (in WvW at least).

Scepter
Similar to staff, there's several slow skills, but scepter ones have much smaller radius which makes them nearly impossible to hit on any moving enemy.

Flamestrike is too slow and second part doesnt follow the target. I think it'd be best to revert it back to single hit+burn and make it castable when target is behind us.

Dragon tooth needs its delay reduced by a lot. Damage could also go down in that case. There's no point of having high damage skill if it never hits.

Phoenix has too high cooldown for what it does. It's too slow to hit moving targets, it doesnt hit very hard either. It should be moving faster, and have 12-15 second cooldown. Secondary effects may as well be removed if they are contributing to current state of this skill.

Shatterstone could be a bit faster since it's also unreliable skill to hit.

Water trident shouldnt be a projectile IMO, it's a defensive skill that can be destroyed with projectile hate. It can spawn from the ground (or be unblockable) and it could also use shorter cooldown (15 or 18).

Blinding flash should apply revealed for a few seconds.

Stone shards definitely need improved cast speed.

Dual skills

Fiery frost and glacial drift should be casted from behind. Glacial drift also doesnt hit moving target even if it's chilled, it needs to be faster.

Plasma beam should apply burn on last tick, to match other plasma skills.

I feel like stone tide (scepter water/earth) should be swapped with natural frenzy (sword water/earth). ST is the only aoe field on scepter, and throwing projectiles from NF makes no sense on sword (but it does on scepter). Thematically these skills belong to other weapon; scepter gets another skill similar to hurl and sword gets pulsing aoe field (preferably around caster rather than aoe targeted skill) to apply more melee pressure.

Dagger
Nerfs to once strong cele d/d skills made most of these skills irrelevant with expansion power creep.

Ring of fire should pulse burning on everyone in it, not just enemies crossing it.

Firegrab could use slightly larger cone size.

Vapor blade is a bit too slow to be reliable and a bit too weak to be impactful. One of those two should be improved.

Cone of cold could use higher healing. It doesnt need to be aoe heal, it could be additional personal heal, but it's very weak for a 2 second channel.

Frost aura and cleansing wave could be reduced to 25 second.

Ride the lightning has too high cooldown for a gap closer. Ranger gets nearly same effect on a much shorter cooldown. 15 second cooldown with no hitting requirement would be perfect. Not sure how that's manageable considering that skill 3 has 25 second cooldown, and skills are sorted by cooldown.

Updraft has way too high cooldown for what it does. It shouldnt be more than 25, even if it means that swiftness should be removed.

Impale could use some cripple or higher damage.

Earthquake and churning earth could use a bit shorted coodowns.

Dual skills

Steam surge needs a bit longer water field since it doesnt have a purpose right now. Or remove water field, reduce cooldown and add personal healing on cast.

Plasma burst: cast time increased to 0.5, range increased to 300. Damage could also be higher for this cooldown.

Mud slide has quite low hitbox, making it unreliable to hit moving targets.

Focus
Most of the skills are great, but some of them could use tweaks.

Flamewall (and napalm on engineer) need higher hitbox. They are very strong skills in PvE condi builds, but it's quite hard to keep enemy in them.

Fire shield needs additional effect either by buffing aura itself (I've seen plenty of good suggestions like pulsing aoe burn, reduced incoming condi damage etc.) or just adding that effect on this skill. The best case would be replacing all aura skills (staff earth 3, dagger water 4, dagger air 3 and this one) with some effect that gives aura on top (like shouts do).

Freezing gust has too high cooldown. It's often compared with winter's bite whose only downside is it being a projectile, but it's like twice as effective. Since offhand weapon cooldowns can be tricky to manage, I'd suggest adding additional effect instead, like 10 stacks of vulnerability for 3-5 seconds.

Comet needs to be more reliable since it's not a ground-targeted skill and enemy can avoid it while running.

4 second knockdown on 40 second cooldown is a bit of an overkill. 3 sec duration on 30 second cooldown sounds more healthy, for both sides of this skill.

Considering that focus is mostly used on squishy builds, 50 second cooldown for invuln is a bit too much. 40 would be much better, duration could be reduced to 3 seconds everywhere, to keep it in line with other invulns.

Warhorn

Heat sync should apply fury by default as well.

Tidal surge could have 5 stacks of vulnerability on hit.

Sand squall needs higher duration of boons, from 2 to 4 or 5. In addition, it could scale from boon duration.

Dust storm should spawn faster and apply more bleeds. It doesnt fit its name at all.

I'd like to see damaging skills from tempest reworked into offensive support skills. All overloads should have improved radius to 360 and affect 10 allies and at least 5 enemies for every pulse and every impact. If they are remaining as 6 second "wait" time and 4 second channel then they need to have additional effect at the end of the channel (not just irrelevant aoe field that everyone can walk out of). Finishing overload grants effect that triggers on attunement swap from traits (each elemental spec has a trait that procs on attunement swap, arcane excluded) - number of procs on finished overload: 1 or 2 (assuming player has those specializations active).

Fire overload : pulses minor damage, burning, might, aoe buff that gives burning on hit each second (same effect like ashes of just on FB or sun spirit; stacks up to 5 times - could be reduced in pvp modes). Finishing overload grants aoe 5 might, 5-10 seconds of fury and 3 more stacks of this buff. Tornado after overloading and whirl finisher would be removed.

Water overload : pulses small heal, short regen, vigor and 1 cleanse per second. Cleanses 2 conditions, applies large heal and applies 5 seconds of vigor and regen on finished overload.

Air overload : pulses minor damage, vulnerability and static charge each second (stacks up to 5 times - could be reduced in pvp modes, damage scales with allies, not the caster; 1 second internal cooldown per enemy hit might be needed in pvp modes to avoid gimmick 1-shots). Finishing overload grants 3 more charges, applies 5/10 vulnerability and blinds.

When it comes to weaver, one could argue that 4 seconds of global attunement cooldown are a bit too much for delaying offhand skills, which usually provide some defense or utility, but reducing that cooldown could introduce very unhealthy builds, especially since alacrity affects those cooldowns. Alternative defensive source can be higher barrier from dual skills and additional barrier source (for example on applying superspeed or on cleanse).

By now, a big majority of ele players want to see current Unravel reworked. I'd like to see a boon version of primordial stance (pulse boon depending on attunement), since both staff and scepter builds lack boon generation a lot. A lot of people suggested adding condi cleanse to unravel, but I'd rather see some cleanses on traits, for example cleanse on superspeed, barrier, dodge, stance skill etc.

Aquatic stance is also quite weak even if all 5 parts hit (which is impossible in any pvp scenario). It could have a single heal and cleanse condition per hit (on hitting enemy, 1 second cooldown) for example.

Arcane shield: increase number of blocks to 5. Alternative change: reduce damage, make it block all attacks for the duration, add flip skill to detonate the shield.

Armor of earth: reduce stability stacks to 5 (you cant even get CC-ed 10 times) and cooldown to 30. Make it either aoe or make both stability and protection pulse over time: 2 stacks on cast and every 2 seconds for 6 seconds - something like balanced stance. Guardian has the same skill on much lower cooldown, which is an aoe stability source. Alternatively keep the same version with reduced stability (5 sec stab, 5 sec prot) and same cooldown - 50, but add ammo charge (2 total).

Lightning flash: Currently the weakest teleport skill compared to blink and shadowstep and ele doesnt have stealth to delay enemy, like thief and mesmer do. I'd like to see damage component of this skill removed (it's pointless), range increased to 1200 to match other two and cooldown reduced to 20/25 seconds. Ele doesnt need stun break on flash, it needs more mobility. Considering that mesmer only has stun break on 30 second cooldown and thief can use shadowstep twice, 20 or 25 second flash seems balanced in comparison. Alternatively keep 30 seconds, but add ammo charge (2 total), like rocket boots on engi.

Conjured weapons should definitely get a rework. A lot of players like the idea of having those on ammo recharge. The most interesting idea I've seen - using conjured weapon adds a flip skill that allows you to drop another conjured weapon for allies (player who dropped it cant pick it up). That way ele doesnt need to run around and pick up conjured weapons and allies still get a chance to use them. I guess that 60 second cooldown (120 on greatsword, 180 is way too much) and 2 ammo charges sounds healthy.

Glyphs of elemental and storm could use a bit shorter cast time. Elemental glyphs could also start cooldown after casting rather than on elemental's death to improve solo pve content even more (pets taking aggro is quite useful there, and both necro and ranger can do this with no downtime, even though they are both tankier than ele).

@Gaile Gray.6029 said:
Those of you who care about the ele and its balance, please join this thread and continue to add your thoughtful and constructive comments. Thank you.

Thanks Gaile for this opportunity

Game mode: sPVP

The vision
It's a game, it must be fun to play.
Each profession should have a purpose.
Profession should not be best everywhere (it's even bad idea), but at least in something the profession must be good.
Remember the principle: "Rock - Paper - Scissors"
It's fun when player is able to react on happening in the game, it's a main principle of interactive game process,
the active defense is a best option for Ele - If you careful and skilled you have chance to play good.

Ele is average today:
Conditions self-removal, self heal under water+any healing amulet, mobility
So Ele is average against conditions based builds

Ele is good today:
Nowhere

What is most annoying? Stun&Knockdowns. You can not do anything like if your keyboard is broken.
Ele has not enough stun-breaks. Without stun-breaks Ele will not live considering how squishy it is.

Suggestions:
Let's select for Weaver a role: semi-bruiser & semi-support with best conditions removal and best stun breaks.
Can be applied on group as well.
Hard counter for any conditions based builds and stun based builds
Weak still against any spike damage or any power based builds (still no armor, no passive defense, no blocks, lowest vitality pool, etc....)

I don't main Ele, but even as a casual observer I can see a number of problems, most of which apply to both PvE and PvP -

They have worst armor and health and, unlike a number of other classes, have very few ways of mitigating damage. Every time I play my Ele solo all I do is die constantly, which is not really a problem I have with other classes. The thief is pretty similar but is saved by things like SoM, Invigorating Precision, and lots of dodges. Eles are desperately in need of better evading, stealth, barrier, or (my favorite option) much more potent control effects built into their toolset to offset their terrible natural attrition. This would also help give them a more specialized group role instead of just "damage", which I don't think is the right way to design the Ele.

Another very obvious issue is that the staff autos (other than fire) have always felt way too weak for their effects. Fire is basically the only worthwhile fallback attunement unless you are in a specialized role in a group. I don't see the point of that, especially since it becomes so thematically limiting. Air, Earth, and Water autos along with Lightning Surge all need significant buffs or to just be redesigned IMO. The animations on them are pretty weaksauce anyway.

I would complain about condition removal, but I honestly think it's more an issue with the design of conditions than it is with the design of Eles (the balance team has messed up making conditions both too strong and too easy to get rid of, which just wrecks the game's balance in a lot of ways). Although, if that isn't going to change, they need better access to it.

I main ele PVE , i am a casual player, a noob as you might say.. (complete living worlds quest and fight monsters). I just build my char as i see fit, not following any meta. (I do not do any sPVP).

I normally run tempest S/W, Fire for damage, Water for healing, Lightning for Running, Earth.. well only for war horn extending boons. I have no issue with that specialization. My only concern is why i only benefit from 2 of my 3 traits at any given time.. as some traits require you to be attune to that element.. i do not see that in other classes. So i end up picking those traits that like power % -> vitality %.. so i get passive improvement..

When weaver came out, i was excited. I was like thinking.. wow, now we can attune to 2 elements at the same time, while giving up overload abilities.
Finally a spec that can fully utilize 3 traits lines. (weaver + fire + water).. So i decided to build fire / water + weaver build.. thinking i might have smoothing mist + damage output from the fire line. Or run faster and heal with the lightning line + water. To my disappointment.. when you switch to the new attunement.. you lose the previous attunement buffs.. .. even when the skills still exist.

I have a simple question / request... why is that so for weavers? Why still single attunement only even when you are hybrid.. wielding both fire / water. I do not see it overpowering to be leveraging on 3 traits line at the same time.. Other classes i believe have access to 3 traits all the time.

Hello guys, presentations first. My in-game name is Glorfyndel, I am a sPvP/WvW veteran player of Elementalist (as a few of you).
I am going to talk about Elementalist Player v Player situation/context (it includes PvP and WvW).
As I have experience in computer science/game design/mathematics and image processing (engineer hands up ^^) I will talk about the problems and suggest solutions categorized by cheapest (easy to implement) to expensive (high implementation effort).

I am proud of you Arena net because you made one of the most wonderful expansions I have ever played (it felt like the old hype around nightfall/factions/eye of the north expansions) and please, Gaile Gray, give my congratulations to your team for all the new stuff (specially the mounts implementation) and new specializations.

However I must give you my opinion on Weaver and I hope it will help to take decisions.

Because "Cleansing Water" coupled with "Woven Strides" is our only way to get enough dispels to be viable we are forced to all play the same build. With those changes we give more build diversity (aka Fire line with "One with fire" and "Pyromancer's Puissance" for perma 25 stacks of might without any combo field needed, Earth line for a "tankier" build or Air line for a lightning rod/fresh air critical strikes based build)

Elemental attunement: make the buffs on swapping elements base line on Elementalist.

Elemental Attunement: Put fury 2 sec on swapping element.

Elemental enchantment: make the 15% reduction base line on Elementalist.

Elemental enchantment: Increase the concentration to 250.

Because Elementalists are a "buff based" class we all do the same choice. We all play Arcane line because of "Elemental attunement" and "Elemental enchantment" are the two most important traits for us so far. So putting those two abilities into base line will free Elementalist from Arcana. Again it will allow Ele's to play something else as I show in the Water line "independence" example.

Rock solid: Stability: 2sec of stability and 2000 barrier on while switching on earth.

Barrier is an awesome idea! However, the truth is that numbers were not there. So increasing all the barrier will may give the survivability all Elementalist wanted. Finally, if we add barrier to "Solid Rock" it may be in the right direction of a more defensive Earth line.

Unravel: when pressed (like a 5th element mechanic), you attunement into full element during 4 sec losing dual attack, this ability was 12sec cooldown, no charges and it is not a stance (just like another element).

Blaze Stance: You quick jump (1/2 sec evade) to a location (500 range) and release a blast of fire on landing (power base), this movement ability cleans all movement impairing conditions (chill, root, cripple).
This ability highly depend on your power to do damage and it is 25 sec cooldown, 2 charges.

This is a rework of the Weaver so you can play other weappons like Dagger/Dagger, Staff or Scepter/Focus without having to use a particular utility skill. It is so sad that your Arena net team work so hard on other dual skill that sword and no one are using them... And the "Blaze Stance" mobility skill could free Ele's from "Lightning Flash" that has been mandatory since the beta.

This is a rework of the core Elementalist conjure set of weapons. With the change we are making conjures viable in Player versus Player situation because even in PVE context it was super hard to pick up your second weapon in the middle of AOE's and stuff going on.

CONCLUSION: The problems-solutions examples number 1, 2, 3 and 4 are really a cheap effort implementation and top priority. The number 4 and 6 are more like a poolish of the Elementalist if you want to tryhard on this.

Here's what I think that is needed to make ele decent (i.e. meta viable) without redesigning the class completely. Some of these has been mentioned over and over since the beginning of PoF much like how Elusive Mind should be reworked for Mirage yet balance team keep thinking otherwise:

Stop making condi cleanses dependent on a single trait in the water trait line. If there are options in other trait lines to cleanse condis, it can not only encourage build diversity, but can also get people to move away from the "get weaver to 10% hp and they heal to full" (which is mainly achieve through high healing power from Menders amulet, Healing Ripple, and Regen spamming) water build that people keep complaining about.

Either reduce the cast time of all sword #3 double attuned skills to 1/2s or increase their range to 300 with a frontal cone cleave
3a. Of all the sword #3 double attuned skills, Aqua Siphon and Rust Frenzy are the most useless. On top of the buff on point #3, Aqua Siphon should either apply some cc such as 1s daze or 5s chill on enemy hit or just do similar amounts of damage as Quantum Strike/Cauterizing Strike. Rust Frenzy, on top of buff on point #3, should be buffed by one the following: have its physical damage (i.e. non bleeding portion) drastically increased, have it apply long immobilize on enemy similar to warrior's Flurry burst skill, or gain evade frame.

Revert the change that prevent Shearing Edge and Natural Frenzy from hitting enemies behind you. You can revert Natural Frenzy's 33% damage buff too if you feel it might be too strong because these 2 skills are just really awful now, especially Natural Frenzy where you have to basically stand still just to reliably get it to fully cast, and enemies can side step to avoid all the attacks due to the projectile being so slow.

Reduce the cast time of all the final attack of sword's auto attack chain to 1/2s.
5a. Increase the damage of all of sword's water's autoattack to be similar in damage to other element's, remove the healing if you have to, because currently that autoattack chain don't do anything, and it's better to just spam it while running away to heal with Signet of Restoration instead of attempting to heal by hitting the enemy with it (and get vastly out-traded instead).

Flame Uprising should have its leap range increased to 600 (not just 450+180 flame radius, which, funnily enough falls short of hitting a stationary target that is 600 range away even though it's supposedly 630 range total; holo leap doesn't have this issue). One of the main issue with dealing damage as sword weaver is definitely that enemies can just kite by simply running away in a straight line because you're melee and don't have enough gap closers. Every other classes that wields melee weapons, including warriors, have tons gap closers or can swap to long range weapon (eg. holosmith) so why do sword weavers, the only class that doesn't get the option of 2nd weapon set, get only one high cd gap closer (Polaric Leap on 15s)? Being forced to swap to air attunement just to chase down someone when most of your damaging skills is in fire attunement is also why kiting sword weaver is so easy.

If all of the above changes went through without any random nerfs that balance team seem to like to do to compensate for the buffs, I feel like sword weaver should be in a pretty good spot in Pvp, which can also mean it'll be decent in WvW roaming.

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PvE:

Either just revert the unwarranted Lava Font nerf from the recent patch or change meteor shower back to doing the same damage as the bugged week (in PvE only for MS). The elements of rage nerf is already a big enough nerf on weaver's general dps, even more so on huge hitboxes with the lightning hammer, ice bow, and lightning glyph changes. Reverting Lava Font nerf will also help zerging eles in WvW

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WvW:

I don't play much of this mode other than just recently started getting into it because I wanted the mistforged armors, but I personally think, on top of the PvP and PvE changes listed above, which should also get applied to WvW, the best thing to do for zerg eles is to completely redesign or buff tempest. Redesigning/buffing staff's autoattack skills so not all of them are useless except fireball (especially staff's water auto, which is in the same state as sword's water auto -- no damage + not enough healing) like another post has mentioned is also good.

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Others:

Dagger main hand and Scepters definitely needs buffs or just reworking conjures to serve as a 2ndary weapon that can be swapped to for some time, without long cd similar to engi's kits, can help, but I will already be very grateful if the above changes went through so we can at least have one competitive meta build in all the game modes.

One problem for Ele in PvP and WvW is that a disproportionate amount of both its survivability and damage have been based on boons compared to other classes. The introduction of scourge, spellbreaker and even meta mesmer builds have hit it especially hard - an interesting change to diamond skin could be to make the Elementalist immune to boon corrupts and strips - no health threshold because these abilities are much rarer than condition applications.

The current diamond skin is an example of the poor “when hit” trait design that is incompatible with Elementalists base stats.

This would be a very different and situationally strong trait, without being OP due to the many classes which don’t rely on strips/corrupts and the fact it still allows normal conditions to be applied.

Pvp: Ele is in a really rough spot at the moment. If they had better ways to protect against damage, along with faster cast times for their attacks, then they would be in a more competitive spot. A few unimpressive weapon skills could be made more useful, too. (Scepter air #3, focus water #4, both focus fire skills, etc.) Either decreasing their cast times or giving them better access to stability would make it so that they can at least activate some of their attacks. Stun break on lightning flash would be cool too. ^^

Also, thank you to the players who were able to raise awareness of the issues with ele and made this discussion possible, and also to Anet for taking the time to listen.

Listening is one thing, acting wisely is another.
I can't see positive improvements with 3-4 balance patchs per year.
We might see a few ele buffs next patch (october-november). It most likely won't be enough, so maybe in february 2019, ele will be in good spot.

A lot of suggestions are aimed towards narrowing the focus of specific traitlines, or the elementalist in general. While I understand what those suggestions are trying to accomplish, I personally find the versatility and lack of focus of the elementalist the most appealing thing about the profession.

The main issue in PvE is, in my opinion, is that the ele's versatility is outclassed by the way raid and fractal meta groups are setup. Sure, the ele can provide a lot of boons, but because the druid and chrono already supply the max stacks of everything, those boons are wasted.

When playing with non-meta pugs though, the ele really shines. Whatever boons are lacking can be supplied by the ele, there's snaring, healing or blindness available if required and if you're not stacking max of everything, the added conditions can really help fill the gaps.

Skills like Glyph of Storms (Earth), Geyser (with ress buff) and Healing Rain can be quite useful even to full dps builds. The problem however is that in a lot of situations, they're completely useless (bosses with breakbars come to mind).

One thing I like in particular about staff ele, is the whole combo field/finisher mechanic. You have that 1 blast finishers that you can use to either heal, or stack might, or give swiftness, or add an aura, but you can only pick one of them. That gives the ele a ton of versatility, but balanced by the fact that you only can get 1 of those effects at a time. The added fun is that when playing with others ,you really have to place your combo's carefully to make the most of them (an extra challenge, but it also adds more potential combo's). The downside is that a lot of combos are effectively useless these days (projectile finisher/ice field/chill stack max comes to mind).

Another important thing I'd really like to emphasize is that Weaver and Tempest shouldn't have to be different just by making the first a dps spec and the second a support spec. The playstyle of both specs are vastly different due to how attunement swaps function and that could be their defining difference. So instead of making the spec's traits do a single thing with minor variations, why not make the traits determine if the build is support or dps? Harmonious Conduit vs. Invigorating Torrents is a good example of how the spec could be turned either to support or dps. Let the player decide what kind of Weaver or Tempest they want to play, rather than forcing them to dps or support.

tl;dr My changes would focus on decreasing power creep like druid's 10-man might and chrono's all boons stacking to make the ele's versatility more relevant. The ele itself should get trait choices that allow both elite specs to be played as either dps or support, depending on the individual trait choices rather than the trait line as a whole.

You get the idea: each line must offer something to all aspects of the game. The offer must be small enough (like, each line adds heal for about 1/3 of what Water adds heal). But things need to be spreaded out. You can't let Air has a monopoly on damage, and Water has a monopoly on Defense. That's what make Ele so bad at everything.

And as any triangle you can only pick one corner. Or a middleground and be half of everything.

I think that rather than a triangle, we should think of a hexagon or roles that works across all games modes for all professions:

Power

Condition

Sustain

Support

Control

Mobility

If we give each one a score from 1 to 5, any build that has a score of 5 in more than 2 of those, a score of 4 in more than 3 and 3 in more than 4 is bad news. As well as any build with a total score over 15.

Elementalists have the problem that many of their builds touch too many roles across all game modes even when they do not bring specific traits and stats that go with those . Because of that, they have been progressively toned down until they can't really be particularly good at more than one at a time, while most meta builds can do 2-3 roles, and a few some even more, and when they do have something good, someone else always has something better.

You get the idea: each line must offer something to all aspects of the game. The offer must be small enough (like, each line adds heal for about 1/3 of what Water adds heal). But things need to be spreaded out. You can't let Air has a monopoly on damage, and Water has a monopoly on Defense. That's what make Ele so bad at everything.

That's not a bad idea. I especially like the idea of giving eles the ability to strip boons if they spec for it, too. It would really make the specs count for something, too.

You get the idea: each line must offer something to all aspects of the game. The offer must be small enough (like, each line adds heal for about 1/3 of what Water adds heal). But things need to be spreaded out. You can't let Air has a monopoly on damage, and Water has a monopoly on Defense. That's what make Ele so bad at everything.

What you're suggesting will make ele even worse than what it currently is because now all the trait lines are some bad lines that do a little bit of everything but not enough of anything, especially the heal on rare situations such as removing boons or evading an attack, and fire line definitely does not need its might generation reduced because currently every other class that can generate might generate them at a lot faster rate than eles (even necros with blood is power). It will just be like how sword weaver currently is trying to be hybrid power and condi damage and just end up not enough of anything. Picking tempest or weaver specialization also means you can only pick 2 normal lines, and when you spread these all out across 5 lines it will just not work. Some comments might make ele too OP but a lot of the suggestions are completely reasonably to me.

None of the other classes have trait lines that tries to do everything in a single line and attempt to balance it by making the everything it does insignificant. You can clearly see the many lines in other class are definitely mainly all defensive (eg. Engi's Inventions, Necro's Blood Magic, Mesmer's Inspiration, Warrior's defense), all utility (Engi's Alchemy, Necro's Soul Reaping, Mesmer's Chaos), or all offensive (eg. Engi's Firearm, Necro's Curses, Mesmer's dueling). I just listed some specific examples of lines with specific purposes, if you look at all the classes including Guardian, Revenant, Ranger, and Thief that I didn't mention you can see it's all like that.

My feedback is about PvE. I've also played PvP and WvW with ele, but it was a longer time ago so I don't want to give an uneducated opinion.

The most obvious issue is the lack of defenses in the class mechanics coupled with the low health pool. In order to reach a decent damage one has to forsake any kind of defense, thus becoming extremely dependant on the team. This damage is more unreliable and goes down considerably without support. A sword weaver might be the squishiest damage dealer there is and worst of all, unlike other classes. the range of the ele is locked by the choice of weapons. A sword weaver has to stay close to his enermy almost all the time to deal damage (though I guess this is a much bigger issue in other game modes).
Another problem is that the utility skills are often just plain bad compared to those of other classes. Conjures in particular feel very clunky and unrewarding. Somewhere I read about an idea to turn them into an alternative weapon set, which could also solve the range issue, but I'm not quite sure how to implement this with several conjures.

Something I'd like to see is to shift the focus of the skills from attunements to weapons. Most of the time all defensive skills are on water or earth lines. For a dps orientated build some attunements are never used. Instead I'd give every attument both offensive and defensive skills. and let the general theme be decided by the weapon (e.g. for some weapons power damage is higher, other have more access to conditions, others are more defensive or have a lot of cc), simply so that every attument is at least useful for every kind of build and one shouldn't feel bad for accidentally switching to water in a dps build. Thematically there are more than enough possibilities: Water can be used to hurl huge chunks of ice for strong power damage or shards for bleeding damage. Earth should have overwhelming strength, not just toughness and some sharp rocks.
Of course this would require a large rework, but it would make the ele much more versatile, which it's supposed to be, as more than one attunement is useful in a situation.

Of course there are other things as well, but those would be the things I'd like to see done the most.

You get the idea: each line must offer something to all aspects of the game. The offer must be small enough (like, each line adds heal for about 1/3 of what Water adds heal). But things need to be spreaded out. You can't let Air has a monopoly on damage, and Water has a monopoly on Defense. That's what make Ele so bad at everything.

What you're suggesting will make ele even worse than what it currently is because now all the trait lines are some bad lines that do a little bit of everything but not enough of anything, especially the heal on rare situations such as removing boons or evading an attack, and fire line definitely does not need its might generation reduced because currently every other class that can generate might generate them at a lot faster rate than eles (even necros with blood is power). It will just be like how sword weaver currently is trying to be hybrid power and condi damage and just end up not enough of anything. Picking tempest or weaver specialization also means you can only pick 2 normal lines, and when you spread these all out across 5 lines it will just not work. Some comments might make ele too OP but a lot of the suggestions are completely reasonably to me.

None of the other classes have trait lines that tries to do everything in a single line and attempt to balance it by making the everything it does insignificant. You can clearly see the many lines in other class are definitely mainly all defensive (eg. Engi's Inventions, Necro's Blood Magic, Mesmer's Inspiration, Warrior's defense), all utility (Engi's Alchemy, Necro's Soul Reaping, Mesmer's Chaos), or all offensive (eg. Engi's Firearm, Necro's Curses, Mesmer's dueling). I just listed some specific examples of lines with specific purposes, if you look at all the classes including Guardian, Revenant, Ranger, and Thief that I didn't mention you can see it's all like that.

You're thinking about it too shallowly. Things add up.

Let's assume:
Before:

Fire 100% damage

Water 100% defense

Arcana 100% utility

If you take only Arcana, you will have no heal at all.

After:

Fire 40% damage, 30% defense, 30% utility

Water 25% damage, 40% defense, 35% utility

Arcana 40% damage, 20% defense, 40% utility

Now it opens up the freedom for people to play-the-way-they-want. Of course, the number and specific changes are always up to debate. But I think that's the principle we want to go with. That makes trait line more usable, and none of the trait line becomes a must pick like the current Water line.

Breaking this down into sections. Mainly do PvE with a little WvW. Mostly the support role in raids (druid, tempest, maybe chrono).

Like many have said the issue with elementalist is that is just doesn't get value for its money. The game as founded in 2012 had a completely different design perspective than what is seen today and elementalist just hasn't kept up. This of course was masked by its high damage in organized PvE and the removal of that damage has highlighted everything wrong with the class today. The issue is that the class is really in a bad spot and the moment and needs nothing short or a major rework to fix.

Elementalist get nothing for free. Unlike mesmer or warrior or guardian or ranger the class mechanic of the elementalist (attunement swap) has real opportunity cost. Sure you get attunements and more skills but it costs something to change attunement. If you are swapping from fire to water you aren't going to be doing much damage. if you swap from water to fire you aren't going to be doing any healing. Other classes don't have this tradeoff. Rangers can equip pets but the pets don't affect the weapon skills and what they are doing at the moment. Case in point; a druid can freely weapon and pet swap in an raid and if things go south can instantly drop into celestial avatar and heal the group. They have absolute freedom and an 'oh kitten' heal button. Tempest doesn't; if you attune to earth you have to wait 9 seconds to go back to water (which is why changing attunements feels bad as a support tempest). You simply aren't free - you are constrained by the attunement system. Firebrand likewise can use its weapon skills freely and can at any moment use a tome - 0 opportunity costs or tradeoffs with regards to weapon skills. There is nothing for free in the attunement system (no effects or boons baseline) and it as a class mechanic actively constrains the gameplay of the elementalist. There needs to be some buff here, some change. A possible suggestion would be to make something like elemental attunement baseline (does not affect allies).

The raison d'etre for the elementalist, indeed what all the tradeoffs inherent in the class revolved around was BIG DAMAGE. That simply doesn't exist anymore. Thus the core design goals of the class have been invalidated. And even if the elementalist did marginally more damage than other classes under perfect conditions (it doesn't) the tradeoffs inherent in its design wouldn't make it worth it in competitive environments such as PvP with it has about half the effective HP of other classes. This is why ele sucks in PvP and is very mediocre in WvW. Raids have pushed the balance in this game towards normalizing damage - this would imply that its time to normalize sustain and health to some degree.

As many have said, the trait system is just too confining for the elementalist. Elementalist has 4 attunements and traitlines for each attunement. The elementalist can specialize deeply in traits but the traits when viewed from a global perspective are weak as they only affect 1 of the four attunements to any significant degree. Look at the fire traitline; 2 of the minor traits are completely useless (empowering flame and sunspot) when not in fire attunement and one is situationally useless (burning rage). Grandmaster traits are similar, 2 are completely useless outside fire attunement (Blinding ashes and pyromancer's puissance) and one is only very situationally useful (lava font on downed). Other traitlines are similar. With an elite specialization you can at most buff two attunements leaving two attunements rather terrible (and which you really don't want to swap to). Traitlines need to be made more thematic and less attunement focused. Fire is the raw damage traitline not just the fire traitline. Air affects crits outside of air attunement. Etc. Thus the elementalist would not be so pigeonholed and could make more use of attunement swap. Some traits such as Piercing Shards simply are bad and antithematical - there simply isn't a lot of damage in water attunement.

Weapon skills are the same way. Just unfocused. Many skills just feel weak and useless. Look at focus fire 4 and 5 skills. What is the point of these skills? A firewall which does so little damage and is ultimately inconsequential. Enemies don't care if they cross it because it does nothing to them. Focus 5: gives you fire aura. Again, skill 5 (supposed to be one of the stronger weapon skills) just gives you an aura. I will talk more about just how bad auras are but it needs to be said for itself how weak this weapon skills is. Other skills such as dagger 5 air have hugely unrealistic cooldowns for what they do. This of course goes back to the original conception of elementalist; lots of low impact skills that you are going to juggle between. But this conception is dead. All skills have a cast time - you can only ever be casting (not counting instant casts) one skill at a time. And with this in mind fewer high impact stacked skills are going to be far superior to many low impact skills cast one after another especially when you pad downtime with stronger autoattacks. A mesmer can load their shatters and scourge f abilities do so many things at once. Elementalist, with skills that just do one thing (i.e. Freezing Gust: 3s chill, 1/2s cast time, 25s cooldown) cannot compete loaded skills such as Winter's Bite (4s chill, bleeds (2x 8 sec), 3x direct damage, pet gives 10s weakness, 1/2s cast time 10s cooldown. This skill can also be traited to be AOE). Winter's bite has been buffed according to the wiki 8 times (0 nerfs) since release (original was similar to Freezing Gust but with 10s cooldown). Freezing Gust has been buffed once (aftercast reduced). There is no comparison between these skills. Other classes have vastly more impactfull individual skills than the elementalist but they also in general have significantly stronger auto attacks A LOT of elementalist weapon skills need to be tweaked and strongly buffed to compensate for the power creep applied to other classes. This isn't a exaggeration; look at the power different in this example and you can see the amount of buffing (its a LOT) that is going to be required for weapons sets such as focus to really be viable. Weapons such as dagger, scepter and focus simply don't have the damage, conditions, boons, or other effects on them to make them viable despite the elementalist operating at such a stat deficiency compared to its opponents. Weapons also lack purpose and need to be reworked along those lines (i.e. staff fire 3 is pointless because staff is never run with condition gear, its power or support and this skill simply doesn't fit either of those builds). There are more suggestions on weapons skills (i.e. Healing rain 10 target cap, eruption animation sped up, no bleeds) and others have already posted examples.

Sustain is something that just isn't there. The lack of blocks and/or ways of mitigating damage without huge trait and utility investment is absent. The sustain for the elementalist was initially envisioned as Healing power and raw heals. Which simply doesn't work with a tiny little health pool, the continued nerfs to raw healing output (specifically in PvP), the attunement system and its lockout of simultaneous damage and sustain, and the damage and power creep of the last two expansions. There are a couple issues here but heals as a sustain tool doesn't work too well with a low healthpool and high damage. Raw healing doesn't prevent 1 and 2 shots or being CCd to death. On a small health pool with high damage you want to be topped up but topping yourself up frequently involves overhealing and thus wasted heals. Raw healing has also been reduced (riptide nerf). Long story short sustain through healing doesn't work anymore.

Here I will offer my thoughts on the elite specializations and some specific improvements.

Tempest

This specialization lacks identity. The damage is lackingand elementalist already has a dps spec so it would be good if it was given the purity of purpose treatment and make it a proper support specialization. Given the name and theme there should be more of an offensive focus (also to break the druid chrono dominance in PvE and the Firebrand dominance in PvP/WvW. Buffs to other support professions are also needed though to a significantly smaller degree). Honestly give tempest more boons and for thematical reasons give it access to quickness. (Note that the other elementalist traitlines need work because nothing in them outside of water screams support in any conhesive way. For instance the GM earth traits have nothing in a support capacity. "One with Fire" for instance needs the might per aura doubled to be meaningful.)
The name brings to mind the raw unbrindled power of a storm but to quote Macbeth the best description of the specialization is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The traits are just not that great.
Speedy Conduit: Gain swiftness on overload.
Hardy Conduit: Gain protection on overload, protection has increased effectiveness.
Both these traits suck. Ele has tons of swiftness it doesn't need more. The protection effectiveness is only on yourself and is going to be less effective than a simple flat 5% damage reduction (because you only get the bonus if you have the boon, 6.6% with protection). Both these minor traits only apply to yourself making them even worse. Make Hardy Conduit apply protection as well to allies. Change Speedy Conduit to the heal on aura from elemental bastion.
Latent Stamina: Terrible, needs buffs. Maybe reduce the ICD.
Gale Song: Fine
Unstable Conduit: Aura's become superior auras.
Tempestuous Aria: Weak, have this also reduce shout cooldown by 20%. Shouts are extremely extremely weak with their only value coming from their synergy with auras.
Invigorating Torrents: Kinda OK
Harmonious conduit: Stability to allies when beginning an overload.
Imbued Melodies: Fine. Actually quite good if there was any reason to use a warhorn.
Lucid Singularity: Now removes a condition on start of overload and an additional condition on completion to allies.
Elemental Bastion: Overloads cause an attunement to have a reduced recharge (20s -> 15s).

Warhorn
All skills have far too long of a cooldown; 10-25% reduction in cooldowns.
Heat Sync: Grants 10s of fury as well.
Watery Globe and Tidal Surge: The healing on these skills is quite weak. Reduce the cooldowns significantly and increase healing by at least 50%. They have 35s cooldowns and maybe 2-3k base healing each.
Cyclone: Pull is 360 radius, 5 targets.
Lightening Orb: Targets allies, reduced number of orbs, grants small amount of quickness.
Sand Squall: 4 second boon increase and this is affected by boon duration.

Utilities
Other the proc an aura, these skills don't do much. Reduce the cooldown by about 5 seconds on each shout (not the healing one or elite).
Rebound: Needs a rework because its bad. It is very hard to predict when people will die. You don't want them to die. So you heal them. So they don't die. So your elite skill just because useless. Even if they would go into down state they still have at most ~5k health so you still need to heal them. Or they die to conditions which rebound doesn't cleanse and so they die 2 seconds later. Rebound needs to cleanse all conditions when it revives someone. Rebound needs to be instant. The healing needs to take place when the effect times out regardless (so it actually does something even if nobody dies). Have this skill grant 5s of quickness when the effect is applied.

Overloads

Overload Air should grant allies swiftness during overload.

Auras

Now stack in duration. This is 100% necessary for them to be actually useful (the auras themselves are just plain bad). Getting hit to proc a beneficial effect is not a good strategy for anyone, especially the low health elementalist. Auras should not be affected by boon duration for balance reasons.
Superior Fire Aura: Burns when you hit an enemy (1-2s). 1-2s ICD. Gain might when you hit an enemy (6s, 1s ICD).
Superior Frost Aura: Incoming damage reduced by 15%. Small heal on hit (ICD 1s) and chills foes on hit.
Superior Magnetic Aura: Reflect projectiles with magnetic energy, if the reflected projectile hits steal a boon and/or transfer a condition.
Superior Shocking Aura: Stuns foes you attack. Same conditions as Shocking Aura but you don't need to get hit.

Buffs may seem extreme but yes tempest is that bad. No real flat dps buffs but significantly better boons. Still only 5 man (should be able to maintain 25 might, fury, regen, vigor, swiftness, protection and a smattering of quickness and other boons to others). Healing will be significantly reduced compared to current staff tempest (dagger/warhorn heals way less and you can't take the improved soothing mist if you want aurashare) to compensate.

Weaver

Weaver is in a far better place than tempest. Barrier output needs at minimum a 50% increase.
Double attuning needs to trigger all attunement traits (it sucks, the only thing you gain from double attuning is the skill 3 which is not good enough).
Sword auto attack chain needs to go. It has no place with elementalist/weaver mechanics.
Sword needs the range of all skills increased from 130 to 180 (the issue isn't just the damage but the consistency of the damage). Weaver just gets kited.
Stances need reduced cooldowns.
Weaver elite can be used while moving (this should also grant some boons).
Perhaps to fix the issue of dual attunment the ability to fully attune should be on a shorter cooldown than to change primary attunements. Maybe 2.5 seconds to fully attune and 4 seconds to swap attunements.

Other Comments

What Ele doesn't need: (Much) more damage in organized PvE. It needs to be near/at the top and it needs to do so without caveats (i.e. a huge portion of its damage coming from utilities in PvE leaving it damage deficient in PvP/WvW where it can't use those utilities) but it absolutely shouldn't be top of the line like it was at PoF release.

Taken together all of these changes would/could be excessive.

TLDR: Ele needs a lot of work. Probably the most in need of a complete rework in the game at the moment. If damage across classes is to remain relatively similar for raid balancing reasons then elementalist needs a lot of sustain and support added back in to help neutralize its glaring deficits.

I'm not gonna list very specific changes because I know how tedious is reading through numerical stuff. Instead I'll give you a broader scope of ele's issue (mained ele since august 2012).

Pvp builds:
* Every successful ele build relies on sustain. We have zero condi builds, and power builds are outclassed.
* Our entire existence is tied to Water and Arcane. When was the last time you saw a build without either arcane or water?
* Fire trait line is heavily underpowered. You could give us back the old might on cantrip and it still wouldn't be top tier due to power creep.

Pve builds:
* Very squishy with complex rotations. Why roll ele when you can just rollface with simpler classes?

Weapons:
* Sword does everything dagger does, but considerably better. Both weapons fill the same niche. This is a serious problem.
* Dagger needs significant buffs in both survivability and damage. Both main and offhand (but more main hand). Weaver locking its best 2 abilities (Shocking Aura and Burning Speed) behind a double attunement is also a severe issue.
* Staff is mostly okay, but lacking in pvp (since release). I assume this is intended by now.
* Focus is fine. Fire attunement is very, VERY boring but meh, at least the other 3 are good.
* Scepter is non existent in pve. It has great burst but still keeps the same issues for years. Namely Dragon's Tooth, Phoenix LONG cd, and its poor autoattacks (abysmal dps).
* Warhorn is okay I guess. Not a lot to say about it.

Healing skills:
* Arcane Brilliance could use the pvp recharge globally.
* Aquatic Stance is never a good choice.
* Ether Renewal could use a shorter channel.
* All the other heals are okay.

Utility skills:
* Glyphs remain bad in every game mode. Only glyph of storms sees some value in pve. GoEP 25% dmg buff was nice, but still not good enough to justify its slot.
* Cantrips are stuck in 2014. The cooldowns are REALLY bad, and the effects are underwhelming.
* Arcane got a really nice pvp buff in adding charges, but then they received nerfs because FA weaver was oh so OP with its zero condi removal / sustain. Revert.
* Shouts are only useful because of the auras. Their cooldowns and effects are rather awful.
* Stances are mostly fine, if not a little clunky. Unravel needs something more to justify its slot.
* Conjures need a full rework. Give them the engi-kit treatment... or something at least.

Elite skills:
* I'm fairly sure ele has the worst elite skills in the entire game. All of them need help. Tornado needs a lower CD and to be as strong as Rampage / Lich form, Glyph needs targeted aoe abilities, FGS needs a much lower cooldown, Weave Self needs to not root yourself when casting Tailored Victory and the tempest elite a full rework, because it's too similar to an engi healing ability and doesn't fit the Elementalist theme.

Talents
* As previously mentioned, Fire traitline is underpowered. It only sees use in pve due to its boring flat damage increase traits.
* Air is mostly fine, but some traits need an update. Such as Zephyr's Boon and Electric Discharge (unfairly nerfed for Core ele).
* Earth is not a bad trait line, but the overreliance on water and arcane ultimately renders it pointless to most builds.
* Water. Oh water, if only we could add some of your sustain and survivability to other trait lines in one way or another... I'm not one for homogenizing things, but this is needed. At least the condi clear part.
* Arcane, the ultimate trait line for an ele, much like trickery for Thief. I don't think the answer is to nerf it, but to make other trait lines (fire, earth) more competitive. A LOT more. Also give us arcane fury back... nobody needs 1 stack of might for 8 seconds on att. swap. Seriously. It's one of those changes nobody asked, like Thief's Blinding Powder becoming a stun break. STOP DOING THAT.
* Tempest. Very dull traits with almost no impact. Needs a full rework.
* Weaver. Like already mentioned in water, add some standalone condi clear in here please, don't make us rely on water all the time.

You get the idea: each line must offer something to all aspects of the game. The offer must be small enough (like, each line adds heal for about 1/3 of what Water adds heal). But things need to be spreaded out. You can't let Air has a monopoly on damage, and Water has a monopoly on Defense. That's what make Ele so bad at everything.

What you're suggesting will make ele even worse than what it currently is because now all the trait lines are some bad lines that do a little bit of everything but not enough of anything, especially the heal on rare situations such as removing boons or evading an attack, and fire line definitely does not need its might generation reduced because currently every other class that can generate might generate them at a lot faster rate than eles (even necros with blood is power). It will just be like how sword weaver currently is trying to be hybrid power and condi damage and just end up not enough of anything. Picking tempest or weaver specialization also means you can only pick 2 normal lines, and when you spread these all out across 5 lines it will just not work. Some comments might make ele too OP but a lot of the suggestions are completely reasonably to me.

None of the other classes have trait lines that tries to do everything in a single line and attempt to balance it by making the everything it does insignificant. You can clearly see the many lines in other class are definitely mainly all defensive (eg. Engi's Inventions, Necro's Blood Magic, Mesmer's Inspiration, Warrior's defense), all utility (Engi's Alchemy, Necro's Soul Reaping, Mesmer's Chaos), or all offensive (eg. Engi's Firearm, Necro's Curses, Mesmer's dueling). I just listed some specific examples of lines with specific purposes, if you look at all the classes including Guardian, Revenant, Ranger, and Thief that I didn't mention you can see it's all like that.

You're thinking about it too shallowly. Things add up.

Let's assume:
Before:

Fire 100% damage

Water 100% defense

Arcana 100% utility

If you take only Arcana, you will have no heal at all.

After:

Fire 40% damage, 30% defense, 30% utility

Water 25% damage, 40% defense, 35% utility

Arcana 40% damage, 20% defense, 40% utility

Now it opens up the freedom for people to play-the-way-they-want. Of course, the number and specific changes are always up to debate. But I think that's the principle we want to go with. That makes trait line more usable, and none of the trait line becomes a must pick like the current Water line.

Water is only a must pick entirely because of the condi clear. The real must pick is arcane because it's utility is just so much better than every other ele line including tempest and weaver spec. The sword lighting rod build running Air/Arcane/Weaver is perfectly fine when there arent much condi pressure on enemy team (eg. mutiple condi mirages/thieves on other team) it even do decent against scourges. it's just a totally different playstyle where instead of water bunker sustaining a node you now kite around and do a bit more dmg instead, but lose node more easily. You still have a decent sustain with just riptide water field blasting and some regen from arcane

Edit: I can also imagine Earth/Arcane/Weaver do just as well bunkering against mostly power heavy comps as water builds, but when condi cleanse in water is a thing and you can also just out heal damages back to full, of course water will be way better than earth.

Coming from PvE, but my points can be taken generally I think. Mostly just ideas, not hardcore suggestions.

Weapon Skills:
An elementalist's weapon should only determine the range and playstyle, not if you go strictly power or condition damage. Many of them feel like fillers with little use. I usually pop 1-3 skills per attunement just because I want to switch attunements a second later and dont want to waste them in the attunement cooldown. Each element should have a role that they fulfill with comperable efficiency (compareable to other specialized professions) when untraited, and expertly when traited (masterfully when traited+stats).

Roles of Elements:
Go with logic and what the elementalist misses. Play around with the polar opposition of elements. I suspect that ele is stuck in the damage role only because they have not much else to give. Give each element a good set of boons and conditions and have all weapons deal them out comperatively. listed by commonness, ()'s for possible traited effects maybe?Fire: conditions _- burning, (fear); boons_ - might, (fury)Air: conditions - blind, vulnerability, weakness, (confusion, poison); boons - swiftness, fury, quickness, (alacrity)Water: conditions - chill, slow, immobilize, (poison); boons - regeneration, vigor, resistance, Earth: conditions - bleed, torment, cripple, taunt, weakness, (blind, immobilize); boons - protection, aegis, stability (resistance, might)

Traits:
Not a single trait should work only when attuned to a single one element. They can have stronger effects when in their respective element, but locking the elementalist out of any trait completely just because they dont camp in the given element is just... counterproductive to their entire theme.
Traits should synergize with each other more. Not just within a single traitline, but across attunements and elements as well. Kinda like how in GW1 there was Enervating Charge and Stoning (EC inflicts weakness, Stoning knocks down weakened foe; Two opposing elements synergize for maximum effect, ungainly in GW1 attribute system, but easy in GW2's attunement swapping).
Rearrange some traits as necessary between traitlines to get the most out of the given role (like Powerful Auras to Tempest)

Auras:
Anyone can make them with comboing, yet elementalists waste skill-slots on them. Aura weapon skills should either do something significant to warrant a skill slot (akin to Tempest shouts), or the auras that elementalists grant should do something more than what the other professions conjure up. Similarly to how Persistent Flames enhances blasts on fire fields, Auras provided by the elementalist (either through sharing or comboing) should be more powerful. Put this enhancement of auras in the minor grandmaster traits of each element for their respective auras. And get rid of the counterproductive condition of "getting hit while under the aura" to get their full worth, nobody likes to get hurt just to make a trait or skill look not entirely worthless.

Ele is a hybrid class, that's it's crutch. Now if somehow the ele can be spec'd in some sort of way that it becomes a master of a specific element or 2 allowing them to be highly specialized at either: Dps (Fire), Mobility (Air), healing (water), or defensive (earth), maybe then it's more viable. So instead of being able to swap between 4 elements, they can only swap between 2 (or even 1 if we want to go that route allowing them to be extremely specialized).

It's nice to be able to swap between 4 elements; however, it seems to be more of a crutch due to the constant swapping to attain the desired goal with the end goal often being sub-par to what another class can provide. Let the ele master 1-2 elements vaulting them up to something viable, and like it's said above, allow them swap between 1-2 elements.

For me, I used to love using my ele in WvW for outputting dps, now they no longer make sense to use. Revenant puts out a lot more while having more HP along with some decent utility buffs, and the necro puts more while having better defense and HP, even despite it's lackluster mobility.

Specializations face the issue of always starting off really strong and then getting nerfed into down to line-often to the detriment of other possible build combinations. Seriously, stop the cycle of adding % modifiers and later on nerfing them and/or the skills.

For one thing, other classes have different weapon sets that each have a clear identity. Ranger longbow focuses on long ranged direct damage, guardian greatsword focuses on melee AoE direct damage, and the revenant hammer mace/axe combo focuses on condition damage. But looking at something like the elementalist staff, it's a mixed bag because the elementalist is innately so versatile but almost always defaults to ranged direct damage-because it meshes so well with fire and air traits. That leaves the other two elements: earth and water which are primarily used for crowd control (HAHAHA) and snaring/healing. Except, healing requires focusing on healing power, which no power elementalist will use and snares can only last so long.

My general thoughts on this issue is that each weapon set should focus entirely on one, maybe two roles. With other classes, they have two weapon sets they can switch to, which can effectively be used to serve a single role. For example, a deadeye using D/D and rifle--we all know it's most likely a direct damage build, focusing on long range and melee range.

The elementalist doesn't have that sort of luxury. Instead, we have 20 skills, 5 to each of the 4 elements. Each element's skills have a theme and I think that's what's hurting the elementalist badly right now. By theming skills to a particular element for a particular role, you're creating a mixed bag of functionalities on weapons when other classes rarely encounter that problem.

I'd be more interested in reexamining and redefining each weapon kit's role while using each element as a theme on how it would do that. For example, staff is going to focus mostly on direct damage, crowd control, snares, and positioning. One possible route of reexamination and redefinition of the staff's kit would be:

Fire staff: stays the same

Air staff: line-based ground targeting damage and crowd control skills, blinding flash would be replaced with something else, gust could be ground targeted like plasma blast.

Water: no longer has healing components. Skills now focus on chill, vulnerability, and short stuns in circular AoE form, burst damage from a faster ice spike.

Earth: no more bleeding and weakness. Skills now focus on cripple, immobilize, and knockdowns in circular and line AoE forms.

Using this example, the staff has a far more clearer role and allows for a further reexamining and redefining of what each elemental trait line could offer to each weapon set. Maybe fire could have one line focusing on might generation, another line focusing on direct damage, and the third line focusing on burning applications and improving them. With air, one line could focus on extending crowd control durations and rewarding interupts, one line could focus on applying mobility buffs and debuffs, and the third line could focus on applying blinds. The point I'm trying to make is that the current traits aren't as helpful with the current weapon set's roles as they could be because the weapon skills feel all over the place.

On the subject of specializations, this one stings really badly. At HoT's release, the tempest had incredible damage output. Then as time went on, that damage output was nerfed multiple times. At PoF's release, the weaver had incredible damage output. Then as time went on, that damage output was nerfed multiple times. See the pattern? This cycle needs to end and stay dead. When I was practicing the unnerfed weaver raid build, the one thing a more experienced raider told me is that my rotation's main goal was to try and maintain the elements of rage buff. Let's face it, the weaver has a ton of percentage traits that add more power, condition damage/duration, or straight up direct damage to the class. These have to be gone. It'd be better if the skills themselves were as good without having to rely so badly on the crutch of percentage stat increases.

Here is coming from WvW perspective, and the following opinions is about staff-ele because staff is a necessary weapon while working in a team.for WvW
tempest/core :

Overloadings : They are cool but it's hard to complete upon 4s channeling, high risky(full countered by scourge) and bad rewards after completing overloadings. Improve it plz.
How about apply "resistance" or any effect ignore(not immune) condi-dmg during overloadings to "Lucid Singularity"?

Lava : -40%dps need to be separated upon specialization. Unlike weavers, tempest and core ele have no range-dps skill. Ignore this if you want tempests focus on healing.

Rework/adjustment (A problem about speciality . This moment weaver unlike an ele, much like as a quick-hand warrior with less health/armor/no stable CCs in time)
Change global CD 4s back to 1s and tempest attune-mechanic is good to apply it on weaver.
** Example : While "attuning/leaving" air-attunement will make it going in 5s CD before reactive and global going in 1s CD, means that we can sacrifice some survival to cast eles' CCs in time via attuning the 3rd/4th attunement (much like a card game system).
For trait flexibility, "fresh air" can work with above-mentioned well, but need a nerf like 5s ICD and use acrane as a burst way(cri by arcane can active more then once during ICD, like reaper's "Chilling Victory").
rework will make ele can active over 5 weapon skills between attunings in 5s and need some inspections.

I'd like to see the signets buffed. Signet of Fire is nice at the moment, but I think the others are still somewhat lacking.

Signet of Air has a boring passive effect and an even more boring active one. Give this signet an overhaul or something, like a high-burst active effect. You could even make the passive effect give resistance. We might even use it after that.

Fire is cool. Don't change it.

You knocked off one bleed from Earth before and I don't know what the reason was for that. Make this skill AoE, just like Signet of Fire. Don't remove anything from this one, because I like it a lot and I use it a lot.

Hmm, Water. I tried this using this with a heal build + mercy runes (WvW). I like the idea of it having a revive feature, but I don't think 5% is enough. Increase it to 20% and it might become a great utility to use.

Change Elements of Rage back to how it was.
Eruption needs to be WAY faster.

There are many skills that looks good on paper, but then under perform due to the fact that it has after cast and other useless animation time. A skill with 1s cool down tuning can under perform by 25% if it happens to have 0.25s after cast. Things add up a lot. That's why Thief and Mesmer perform much better. They don't have as many useless cast/animation time as Ele does.

@Razor.6392 said:Pve builds:
* Very squishy with complex rotations. Why roll ele when you can just rollface with simpler classes?

As a mostly-solo PVE player who burnt out on WvW a few years ago, this really jumped out at me, because that's what I find myself thinking when choosing which of my characters to play.

By way of background, I'm an altoholic who's been playing since beta (about 6400 hours now) and celebrate diversity with 41 characters (so far).

I've put about 340 hours into my four Elementalists trying to find ways to make them more suitable for general open world and group event gameplay, but inevitably come away feeling underwhelmed.

The big picture problem with Elementalist is its relative lack of efficiency and appeal compared to other classes.

Elementalist costs too much to play for too little benefit. It takes too much to do too little, and because of their inherent inability to take a hit, I'm quite confident that over the past six years, I've revived more Elementalists than all other classes combined.

I love the theme and concept for the profession and would LOVE to play Elementalist more, but for me, at least, it's never the best choice for any job.

ArenaNet, please make Elementalist worthwhile.

"Not the same, real and true. True you feel inside. Always follow what is true." -- Sentry-skritt Bordekka
"I am so much more important than whatever it is you're doing!" -- Explorer Hiffa
"Harpy love hurts!" -- Shaman Shoba

I'm not even sure where to begin with the issues that this class has. This post will mostly be about all game modes, because minor tweaks and number changes cannot fix the fundamental problems that elementalist has. If you only want to apply a certain change to one game mode for split balance, then it has to be numerical and not touch on the mechanics. This is just not enough anymore. Sword has been getting number changes since PoF release, and ele doesn't seem anywhere closer to being meta in PvP or WvW roaming than it was on PoF release. Even though many other classes got PvP nerfs while ele has been getting lots of sword buffs. This has been almost one year of sword buffs and things still feel the same. I won't say much about specific weapons, skills or traits here. It's more of a general look into the shortcomings that the class shows consistently across the board. If I were to talk about specifics here, it could become a book of sorts

First of all, the weapon skills are just too weak. There are some specific weapon skills that are very powerful DPS wise on a static target if you stack a bunch of damage modifiers. However, if that's not the metric that you use to determine how good a skill is, then ele is filled with lackluster weapon skills. There are so many skills that are vastly inferior to similar skills that other classes use. The comparison between freezing gust and winter's bite has already been made several times in this thread, so I don't think that I need to describe the massive difference in power between these 2 skills yet again. The funny thing is that elementalist players consider focus a good weapon. This is the weapon that has freezing gust and those terrible fire skills, flame wall and fire shield. That speaks volumes about how terrible the alternative offhands are. Then there are lots of skills across all the weapons that have needlessly long cast times, delays or aftercasts. The aftercasts are especially hurtful, because not only do they delay your next action, but on paper they make the skills seem better than they are. Tooltips do not show aftercasts after all. Auto attacks are also usually very bad, with a small number of exceptions like fireball and lightning whip.

These sorts of limitations were obviously there to keep elementalists in check, because they have 20 weapon skills. It used to make sense back in the day, but with the current level of power creep most ele skills are now way worse relative to other classes than they used to be in the core game. It gets even worse when you realize that some classes got lots of new skills as part of their elite specs, like firebrand with tomes. Additions such as these have severely diminished the advantage of having 20 skills. This is an issue in all game modes. In the competitive modes having a small number of skills stacked with effects is way better than having all of your effects spread across lots of skills, because that just gives your opponents a chance to recover. Also, having slow attacks is a huge issue there, because players can actually see them coming and can move out of the way. You don't even have to dodge when you can walk out of it before it does anything. The slowness of skills is even an issue with PvE. It is one of the primary reasons why elementalist DPS is so unreliable and hard to master. With all that being said, I believe that having a good look at all the weapon skills and buffing or re-purposing them appropriately is the most important thing that the balance team can do to fix elementalist. Weapon skills are the foundation of every profession. If the weapon skills are not good enough, then the traits and utility skills simply cannot make up for it. The best that you can hope to do with a bad foundation is to make the class OP through bad gimmicks.

Another issue with elementalist is the lack of survivability options that do not require major investment. Elementalist has the lowest base armor rating and HP pool and it has no inherent defense mechanics that you get just for taking the class. Even the elite specs do not get much free defense. Tempest gets a little bit with protection on overloads, but overloads themselves are simply terrible to use in so many situations, so I'm not even sure if I want to count them. Weaver gets some free barrier when it uses dual attacks. This barrier is such an insignificant amount that it may as well not even exist. I wouldn't notice the difference. However, not getting free defense is not a major issue by itself. The problem is that in order to get decent defenses, the investment that elementalist needs is way higher than on other classes. If you want decent cleansing, you need water no matter what. If you want to prevent direct damage, you don't get many good options. Since there is a lack of options for ignoring damage, you have to try and sustain. Sustaining requires healing power, vitality and water, which forces builds to to go full bunker if they want survivability. What makes it even worse is those pesky damage modifiers that you are forced to give up. Every class has damage modifiers, but elementalist is balanced around having the most, which means lower base DPS, which means even lower damage when going full bunker. The amount of damage modifiers is in itself a huge problem for the class, and it becomes very apparent when you try to build defensively. I believe that removing some of the damage modifiers and making some of that damage baseline is in order.

Also, what is up with all the boon power creep that has been going on lately? Elementalist used to be one of the best classes for generating boons for itself, which was feature that was supposed to make up for the lack of inherent survivability. Now it feels like almost every class is better at generating boons for itself. Was this intended or was elementalist completely forgotten in all of this boon power creep?

There are many other issues that I could talk about, but this post is already long enough as it is, so I won't continue anymore. There are many constructive posts in this thread that talk about them anyway.

I can somewhat agree with many players here. I am mainly a PVE player, and I REALLY want to like ele, and I thought weaver would be the one, but sadly no dice, AMAZING concept, just.......
1) Elementalist is already a class that requires a medium to high skill ability with it, as you have 4 weapon sets as your base mechanic. Not gonna lie, my results for playing it be rather poor. And adding suddenly lower cooldowns (that are in fact hard cooldowns VS core mechanic free swap to non-used recently element) in exchange for mix'n match elements and combos sounds nice on paper, but actually playing it just makes it more complex. Where once you might have tried to keep mental track of an elements skill cooldowns, now you have even lower cooldowns requiring more precision to micro manage, plus 4 hybrid skills.
2) Quite frankly ele is a burst cannon as core mechanic. 4 weapon skills, pop all skills, swap to the next, burst, continue. As a whole not sure how I feel about this. I'm trying to build effectively, and yet veteran and up enemies give me a hard time (new content) because the life pool they have plus their new skills directly counter power AND melee bursting.
3) Skills

Signet of restoration working on only one cast with Arc lightning, and any long duration cast.

Obsidian flesh (earth focus 5), 3 seconds invuln for 50 second cooldown. High tradeoff (but again the idea of ele is to shotgun skills, in my understanding).

Some aura granting weapon skills (Frost - Ice dagger 4, Flame - Fire focus) in my opinion are kind of just there for the concept of the quick skill burst then swap to the next set..... I mean the Sunspot trait deals damage AND gives fire aura when you swap to fire..... no the trait doesn't need a nerf, Flame shield needs a buff

Eruption (earth staff 2), 1 1/4 cast time with delayed explosion

The massive damage tradeoff on water skills for often minimalistic healing (hello new water sword auto)

Two ults that change your skills, and one thats just a buffed up minion. Do we not have enough skills? Wheres the fun ult for this class?
4) Traits

Pyromancer's Puisance, just bad really. one might, flames only, many players can get max might fast and easy in groups, and as solo you pop your skills and move on

One with Air, superspeed on air attune..... why?

Inscription, cast a glyph get a boon..... feels like it was just kinda tacked on to the recharge TBH

Elemental Contingency, could be good, but doesn't really compete with the other two

Bountiful Power, could be good but needs 5 boons minimum to match any other traitlines smallest bonus damage trait, and 10 for the better ones. could be good if doubled or 5%

Most of these are my personal experience tho. Again it's a class that requires medium to high proficiency in micromanagement and rapid decision-making if your not just swapping and popping. Anyone that disagree's otherwise probably falls under one of those two categories. Swapper and popper, or able to micromanage.

At least fix water focus 4...... give it a duration or something, make it a mini blizzard.

@Ghin.1653 said:
I can somewhat agree with many players here. I am mainly a PVE player, and I REALLY want to like ele, and I thought weaver would be the one, but sadly no dice, AMAZING concept, just.......
1) Elementalist is already a class that requires a medium to high skill ability with it, as you have 4 weapon sets as your base mechanic. Not gonna lie, my results for playing it be rather poor. And adding suddenly lower cooldowns (that are in fact hard cooldowns VS core mechanic free swap to non-used recently element) in exchange for mix'n match elements and combos sounds nice on paper, but actually playing it just makes it more complex. Where once you might have tried to keep mental track of an elements skill cooldowns, now you have even lower cooldowns requiring more precision to micro manage, plus 4 hybrid skills.

That's exactly what makes ele stand out among the other professions and what makes it, imho, such a fun class to play. I understand that its tricky, clunky, hard to learn, tough to understand and maybe not always very effective...but it's fun!

Eruption (earth staff 2), 1 1/4 cast time with delayed explosion

The reason for that is that you can cast a field over it to combo with. In fact, if you're quick enough, you can cast both Eruption and Ice Spike, then Lava Font, and get 6 stacks of AoE might (and 20 seconds AoE fury if traited). Due to the skills' delays, you can use them in 2 ways. Either you cast Lava Font first, or you cast Lava Font last. That makes them highly flexible.

Bountiful Power, could be good but needs 5 boons minimum to match any other traitlines smallest bonus damage trait, and 10 for the better ones. could be good if doubled or 5%

Arcane is more of a support oriented traitline. Compared to the other 3 support traitlines (Water, Earth and Tempest) it's relatively powerful. Expecially considering the ele can supply 5 boons themselves easily (Elemental Attunement and Renewing Stamina).

Most of these are my personal experience tho. Again it's a class that requires medium to high proficiency in micromanagement and rapid decision-making if your not just swapping and popping. Anyone that disagree's otherwise probably falls under one of those two categories. Swapper and popper, or able to micromanage.

Yeah, I'm probably one of those players. That's what I like about ele. Given that there are 8 (7 if you discount engineer as well) other professions that are more plain, can we please change the ele in a way that preserves its unique playing style?

Look no further than GW1 if you want to give back that special vibe to the elementalist as a class, in GW1 we were far from being the meme class that we're now on the contrary, elementalist was one of the most feared classes : a plethora of devastating aoe/single dmg skill with competitive casting animation and not the insulting joke of GW2 where you have skills that not only root the players but also require 1s+ casting time plus 1s+ of casting animation which is bloody absurd.

We need structural changes aka light rework and not the usual number crunching , we need to give that control/dmg combo back to the class, this was the basis of the elementalist in GW1, check the earth line:

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Earth_Magic
It gives control, offers non strippable defense against direct dmg, it made ele , one tough cookie to digest for anybody...no heal burst monkey "strategy"...pure control/disable to sustain yourself and that principle should be given back to eles

We need to give that intimidating aura back to the class, how is even possible that a midget armed with a rifle scare people more than somebody who manipulate the very force of lightning ? I don't see any other MMO where people laugh/ignore a burst elementalist/mage...https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Air_Magic

How is possible that there are other classes in game that can manipulate fire/burning better than an elementalist? The fire line used to offer so many effects, control and devastating stacks of burninghttps://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Fire_Magic

There are different ways to manipulate the water : create frost armors, blur the vision of enemies, slow their movements, heal allies...but in GW2 all ele does in water is heal burst trying to stay alivehttps://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Water_Magic

We need changes that matter and that improve ele competitiveness in all parts of the game, the design has been left behind while other professions can easily keep up with the ever increasing power creep

-A wise man once said- "Fight cheese with cheese or be cheesed in return, mind not those who will accuse you of being a cheese as they like cheese themselves"

I can make a list of things that needs to be changed to keep up with other classes power creap from core to tempest to weaver they all need tweaks and buffs..atm im on my phone so real quick what pops into my head atm is cleasing fire. Its a 40 sec cd that cleanses 3 condis...what you did with warriors shake it off needs to happen with cleansing fire. At least 2 charges and bring its condi clearing up to 4 at least on a 25-40 sec cd. That will make the skill useful in this heavey condi meta. Il add more later.
As for tempest and there shouts they are all on 40+ second cooldowns making them hard to use effectively when your in combat with this fast pace charge heavy cc heavy meta. The super speed shout is really useful but you can be immeditly cc-ed again right after or having perma immobi on you cuz the single utility condi clear only clears 3 condis every 40 secs. Aftershock is another example of a skill left in the 2015 era(4 years old un changed with the rest of the games power creap and the new era of charges).

First thing, and this should apply to all classes:
There's a need to review the health pools... That system should be deprecated, it's completely obsolete since elite specializations completely override the reasoning for those.
For example, Guardians got, along with eles and thieves, the smallest of all health pools, because they had more tools to heal and sustain. After Druid and Herald/Ventari were released, those clearly surpassed guardian's ability to sustain, and yet the health pools are the same, so there's a huge inconsistency with that. Same thing with tempest for elementalists, although having a large capacity to sustain, they were still surpassed by other classes in that term (Druid outclassed tempest in terms of sustainability in PvE, and Chrono could (and probably still can) outbunker Ele in pvp when the meta was broken), and yet that didn't change the health pools.

Second, although i'm not a big elementalist player, it's probably my least played class, all weapons except staff feel weird, clunky and without much synergy, which is one of the reasons i don't really like ele, because staff feels to static. It's not just a ele problem, but because they have such a smaller pool of weapons, it feels worse with ele. (Another class where this is felt a lot is Engineer, which shares the small weapons pool problem with ele). Basically, a weapon rework is overdue for a lot of classes, there's too many weapons that are barely used or can only be used in very small niches (like staff for guardian, most warhorn skills are only used due to having some mobility enhancement, and although i don't have access to metrics, i'll bet that they're dropped in use a lot since PoF because mounts made them less relevant.

As for ele in particular. It relied too much in the RNG big target aoes to be relevant, after those were (rightfully) reworked, it became a bit less relevant in PvE, although still in top tier. The problem is that kinda like Condi Engineer, it relies on a more or less complicated rotation, which tends to pay off, but for a lot of players it's never going to be the same. It needs a better curve with some builds that are more forgiving.

Elementalist though isn't really the most problematic class, it's still pretty good in PvE and WvW, and honestly PvP is not worth mentioning because overall the whole game mode is broken. Never the less last time i played i saw some pretty good bunker tempest plays coming up, so there's still uses for elementalist.

Ele is a complicated class, some work to make it easier might be a good thing, but it needs to thread a thin line, because any buff has the potential to just make the class broken, since it's already pretty strong.

All in all, i don't think this merits the attention it got, there's classes that need a lot more attention than ele, and this is more that the higher you get the harder the fall, and ele was allowed to reach way too high for way too long.

The overall problem is more with the lack of consistent balance between elite specs and core classes. Like it or not 2/3 of a classe's traits will still be core, most weapons will still come from core, and there will always be core skills. One of the greatest reasons for the problems with balance is the power creep that was allowed into Elite specs to sell them more. Basically the decision to have marketing overpower game play, is coming around and biting us all in the kitten. Also, of course, there's the problem of the lack of enough elites to make a proper checked balance.
Before elite specs every class had a possible build for every role, you could, for the most part, use power and condi builds for dps, every class had a possible healer and or support builds, and most classes could field a tank build (thief and mesmer are probably the only real exceptions). Of course because difficulty was nerfed, and because conditions were useless before the 2014 rework, and since support stats didn't really work before HoT, we didn't really use any of that, but if you removed elite specs, and gave us the current stat sets and game balance, you could really have that going.

The problem is that with elite specs, classes were allowed to specialize much more, and find stronger points that anchor each class. But, apparently, because of marketing and the desire to have Elites as a selling point for expansions, we have been consecutively left in a state that forces most classes to specialize.
A consequence of this is that, because ele was never allowed to specialize, not really, after a small nerf, it can seem to have lost all it's potential, because it never had a defined path.

@ThiBash.5634 said:
The reason for that is that you can cast a field over it to combo with. In fact, if you're quick enough, you can cast both Eruption and Ice Spike, then Lava Font, and get 6 stacks of AoE might (and 20 seconds AoE fury if traited). Due to the skills' delays, you can use them in 2 ways. Either you cast Lava Font first, or you cast Lava Font last. That makes them highly flexible.

I love this style of game play and I use that combo pretty often. However, I feel that these days it's too much effort for almost no payout. Some classes can generate 25 stacks of might for doing less. The balance is really out of whack here.

I've played the game since the beta. My elementalist has by far the highest playtime among all my characters. Recently I've started to put some more effort into my piano-play to get into raiding...right on time for the nerfs. I'm not the type of player to recite all the traits and their respective values, but I'd say I'm a decent ele-player.

I'm mostly playing on staff. I was really excited for the sword...but after playing through the PoF story with sword and dagger right on launch...let's say the weak implementation of sword on launch left a mark.

I've dipped my toes into other professions. Mostly I'm surprised how easy survival is on those characters in open world or story instances and how easy it is to keep damaging your enemy while you're surviving. This feeling builds up pretty fast, even though I mostly have no deep ties to those professions. Low cast-times and less skills that root you to the ground while they still do high damage, some have inbuilt defense or very interesting buff-packages...it feels more fluid, more dynamic.

The ele nowadays feels stiff. With a ton of high cast times, skills that root you to the ground for several seconds and the oh so powerful rotation is messed up easily by a single interrupt because god forbid the ele could attack and defend at the same time. Recently, when I had to collect the materials for the roller beetle saddle, I was once again reminded how long it takes the ele to even auto-attack, given how long I had to camp one specific spawnpoint to get a steam creature before a warrior insta-leaped into it or a longbow-ranger shredded it with a single skill before my projectile even went on it's ballistic arc.

While I could once play a jack of all traits and master of non without any rotations, learning specific rotations allowed the ele to become a master in things like stacking might, or healing, or dealing damage, or supplying stability. All of those narrowly defined and nothing of it in parallel, because that's how rotations work. But apparently that was too strong, so everything was nerfed over time. Everything the ele stood out with was cut off.
High, vertical mobility with lightning flash? Ahaha...now you can almost dodge as far as that skill shadowsteps you. High dps conjures? Useful utility on conjures? Pffft.

With specializations, other classes got roles that allowed them to do two or more of those cut off things in parallel. The druid heals, supplies 25 might, resurrects and can place spirits for passive buffs. A well played chronomancer sustains a ton of buffs, among those the unique alacrity, offer blocks for a whole party and can even tank. Not to mention the amount of CC the mesmer dishes out, while a weaver has to interrupt its dps-rotation and switch through multiple attunements to reach all CC-skills. Both professions also have higher health pools and survivability than an ele while they fullfill those roles.

When Tempest came with HoT, it became a dps-spec with some options for support. PoF came out, Weaver became the new dps-spec for ele. Tempest got...left behind.
The specs followed the mindset of the nerfed "streamlined" elementalist and mostly just gave it new ways to deal damage, until...wait for it...the ele stood out for doing too much damage. Cut.
The specs played more with attunement-mechanics instead of adding any of the roles that were cut off from the ele.

Playing sword or dagger in PvE may be a solution to focus your damage on a single target, but if you deal just the same damage as everyone else while being way more fragile, there is really no use to go melee.

The following suggestions may seem overpowered, but I'm not expecting them to be introduced without adequate balance.

Short term:

Buff the dps back up. It won't fix the ele, but at least it makes it viable again.

Reduce some of the cast- and rooting times. Give the ele a more dynamic feeling.

Rework auras to be a viable asset from open world up to raids. To be usefull for eles, turn on-hit-effects into passive effects. Might as well give the Tempest the ability to cast auras on ten people at once.

Long term:

If you're opposed to let the ele out-dps other professions in melee, shift more passive survivability or vitality to eles in melee-combat, or consider removing the difference in health pools between the professions.

Consider reworking Evasive Arcana into something that doesn't require to sacrifice a dodge, given the squishiness of the ele.

If it's not possible to have multiple options on different specs, rework the specs to represent an option. Improve the support-focus of the Tempest, improve the damage-focus of the Weaver. Just an example what could go into support-attunements with low damage...
-Fire: Burn boons from enemies, raise firewalls to burn projectiles, dispense might, passively increase power for your party
-Air: Stuns. Dispense Quickness and Swiftness for your party
-Water: Pretty much like it is now, but some more condi cleanse, passively increase the vitality and healing of your party
-Earth: More CC and reflects, passively increase defense and condition duration of your party

Rework conjures
Instead of placing one weapon in your hands and one on the ground, give the utility-skill an ammo-mechanic. Using the skill places a weapon in your hands. If you carry a weapon, the utility skill changes, allowing you to place another weapon on the ground. Dropping the weapon in your hand changes the utility skill back. Having the second summon always at hand instead of running around to pick it back up would be a huge QoL-improvement, make it less likely that you pick up a conjure instead of rezzing someone as well as reducing visual clutter at world bosses.
The icebow could use either more damage or more chill. The cc on icebow 5 should be higher for the long cast time.
Earth Shield could need an actual block. Maybe even grant aegis to you and your party if you drop it.
Lightning hammer feels okayish...
Not really sure how to make the fire axe viable.
Fiery greatsword is not bad, but could feel a little more powerful for an elite skill with that cooldown.

Wishlist(not neccessary in my opinion, but would be fun):

Change the elite glyph of elemental to be more like the flesh golem. Permanent and with underwater-forms. For the air elemental you'd just need to add a bubble around the current model, for the fire elemental surround it with the effect of boiling water, the earth elemental could become a mud-cloud that follows you and the ice elemental could turn into an undulating ice-wall.

Pseudo weapon-set: The ele can't switch weapon sets, but it would be nice to have some slots to store a second set of weapons in the equipment-tab.

@ThiBash.5634 said:
The reason for that is that you can cast a field over it to combo with. In fact, if you're quick enough, you can cast both Eruption and Ice Spike, then Lava Font, and get 6 stacks of AoE might (and 20 seconds AoE fury if traited). Due to the skills' delays, you can use them in 2 ways. Either you cast Lava Font first, or you cast Lava Font last. That makes them highly flexible.

I love this style of game play and I use that combo pretty often. However, I feel that these days it's too much effort for almost no payout. Some classes can generate 25 stacks of might for doing less. The balance is really out of whack here.

Agreed. I feel that's the real issue though. The fact that a druid can stack 25 might for 10 people just by using their regular healing skills is a bit insane. I feel that 6 might stacks (plus fury) should be a nice reward for making a tricky combo work...6 might and fury shouldn't feel 'meh'.

Also, the 5 stacks chill cap makes any sort of comboing (especially projectile finishers) with Frozen Ground pointless. I'd really like to see that adressed as well.

@ReaverKane.7598 said:
First thing, and this should apply to all classes:
There's a need to review the health pools... That system should be deprecated, it's completely obsolete since elite specializations completely override the reasoning for those.
For example, Guardians got, along with eles and thieves, the smallest of all health pools, because they had more tools to heal and sustain. After Druid and Herald/Ventari were released, those clearly surpassed guardian's ability to sustain, and yet the health pools are the same, so there's a huge inconsistency with that. Same thing with tempest for elementalists, although having a large capacity to sustain, they were still surpassed by other classes in that term (Druid outclassed tempest in terms of sustainability in PvE, and Chrono could (and probably still can) outbunker Ele in pvp when the meta was broken), and yet that didn't change the health pools.

Second, although i'm not a big elementalist player, it's probably my least played class, all weapons except staff feel weird, clunky and without much synergy, which is one of the reasons i don't really like ele, because staff feels to static. It's not just a ele problem, but because they have such a smaller pool of weapons, it feels worse with ele. (Another class where this is felt a lot is Engineer, which shares the small weapons pool problem with ele). Basically, a weapon rework is overdue for a lot of classes, there's too many weapons that are barely used or can only be used in very small niches (like staff for guardian, most warhorn skills are only used due to having some mobility enhancement, and although i don't have access to metrics, i'll bet that they're dropped in use a lot since PoF because mounts made them less relevant.

As for ele in particular. It relied too much in the RNG big target aoes to be relevant, after those were (rightfully) reworked, it became a bit less relevant in PvE, although still in top tier. The problem is that kinda like Condi Engineer, it relies on a more or less complicated rotation, which tends to pay off, but for a lot of players it's never going to be the same. It needs a better curve with some builds that are more forgiving.

Elementalist though isn't really the most problematic class, it's still pretty good in PvE and WvW, and honestly PvP is not worth mentioning because overall the whole game mode is broken. Never the less last time i played i saw some pretty good bunker tempest plays coming up, so there's still uses for elementalist.

Ele is a complicated class, some work to make it easier might be a good thing, but it needs to thread a thin line, because any buff has the potential to just make the class broken, since it's already pretty strong.

All in all, i don't think this merits the attention it got, there's classes that need a lot more attention than ele, and this is more that the higher you get the harder the fall, and ele was allowed to reach way too high for way too long.

The overall problem is more with the lack of consistent balance between elite specs and core classes. Like it or not 2/3 of a classe's traits will still be core, most weapons will still come from core, and there will always be core skills. One of the greatest reasons for the problems with balance is the power creep that was allowed into Elite specs to sell them more. Basically the decision to have marketing overpower game play, is coming around and biting us all in the kitten. Also, of course, there's the problem of the lack of enough elites to make a proper checked balance.
Before elite specs every class had a possible build for every role, you could, for the most part, use power and condi builds for dps, every class had a possible healer and or support builds, and most classes could field a tank build (thief and mesmer are probably the only real exceptions). Of course because difficulty was nerfed, and because conditions were useless before the 2014 rework, and since support stats didn't really work before HoT, we didn't really use any of that, but if you removed elite specs, and gave us the current stat sets and game balance, you could really have that going.

The problem is that with elite specs, classes were allowed to specialize much more, and find stronger points that anchor each class. But, apparently, because of marketing and the desire to have Elites as a selling point for expansions, we have been consecutively left in a state that forces most classes to specialize.
A consequence of this is that, because ele was never allowed to specialize, not really, after a small nerf, it can seem to have lost all it's potential, because it never had a defined path.

Personal bias and factual analysis are used to describe the situation , this creates feedbacks and skewed perceptions tend to lead to reality where 2-3 professions dominate in everything and everywhere. Before coming down with any evaluation, you're supposed to take in consideration both the PRO and the CONS...not just one while conveniently forgetting about the other.

I don't know precisely to what you're referring to when you talk about "ele being high" and that now ele players are simply having a childish tantrum for this "small nerf" as described by you.

So may you be talking about pve?....I am not a PvEr but from what I observed there : ele was doing the biggest dmg in a coordinated group and that huge dmg came at the cost of any resemblance of sustain , "kindly" provided by the group, if I remember correctly ele was doing 10k or so dmg more than next class and this apparently was/is considered broken by the community

Putting your personal bias aside ....care to explain why ele should have the same dmg as the next profession, while having none of the sustain? Where is the balance in that?

If you want all professions to have same level of dmg...they should have also the same level of sustain more or less..this is a sound, logic argument.

May you be talking about PvP/WvW?..honestly I would be too tired of typing the same arguments again so....maybe you should just tell us how ele is strong and how players are exaggerating for a "small nerf"

-A wise man once said- "Fight cheese with cheese or be cheesed in return, mind not those who will accuse you of being a cheese as they like cheese themselves"

How can this profession be so weak for so much time? I don't really get it! The squishiest of them all has to do crazy rotations just to find itself in the medium tier dmg dealers/healers or whatever else. Ele need to have 1-2 meta builds for all modes (as any other profession) and that's it - you should make it happen, Anet. Why would you play ele when I can accomplish a lot more with a lot fewer efforts. I want to one shot ppl (30k dmg) with my ele too.. with maximum 1-2-3 buttons. I need unblockable 30k dmg skills and I want people to run from me when they see me. I haven't experienced this while I play ele, ever. Did I break 2 keyboards because of crazy rotations? And whats the point? Players start calling me a fool for playing my favorite profession. The worst part is that they are right considering that everything else that moves is doing better than you.

Wishlist:
Everything that kills me should be nerfed
Remove all time gates - I play more than some people yet I receive the same rewards per day/week (PvP/WvW tickets etc)
ANET developments/events and everything else should be in a schedule with the time I play

This a general suggestion that I hope the devs were thinking of with the nerfs to ele.
I have seen several people in this thread talk about reversing the nerfs to ele. I would suggest instead of reversing the nerfs; make the mechanics of skills and utilities better so that we can do a bit more damage and be more useful in all game modes because mechanics are better not just bigger numbers.
An example of changing mechanics to make ele better instead of just bigger numbers: Change to conjures like has been suggested many times instant cast or all low cast time, cd 30s 2 ammo to all conjures except fgs which is like 90 or something no second conjure on ground maybe even if you are holding one the skills become a ground target to put second on the ground. Make conjure elemental skills better to be more reliable and controllable maybe even permanent until killed. These two and more are good suggestions how to make mechanics better (also smaller after cast on allot of skills would be nice to make them more smooth).
so ya please don't just make numbers big make skills fun to use, and not feel clunky and then numbers can be tweaked to change to be balanced.

These changes are minor respect to the power creep other professions have received for years, they would only make ele that much harder to kill and make it able to reclaim their rightful place in the competitive environment

-A wise man once said- "Fight cheese with cheese or be cheesed in return, mind not those who will accuse you of being a cheese as they like cheese themselves"

@ReaverKane.7598 said:
First thing, and this should apply to all classes:
There's a need to review the health pools... That system should be deprecated, it's completely obsolete since elite specializations completely override the reasoning for those.
For example, Guardians got, along with eles and thieves, the smallest of all health pools, because they had more tools to heal and sustain. After Druid and Herald/Ventari were released, those clearly surpassed guardian's ability to sustain, and yet the health pools are the same, so there's a huge inconsistency with that. Same thing with tempest for elementalists, although having a large capacity to sustain, they were still surpassed by other classes in that term (Druid outclassed tempest in terms of sustainability in PvE, and Chrono could (and probably still can) outbunker Ele in pvp when the meta was broken), and yet that didn't change the health pools.

Second, although i'm not a big elementalist player, it's probably my least played class, all weapons except staff feel weird, clunky and without much synergy, which is one of the reasons i don't really like ele, because staff feels to static. It's not just a ele problem, but because they have such a smaller pool of weapons, it feels worse with ele. (Another class where this is felt a lot is Engineer, which shares the small weapons pool problem with ele). Basically, a weapon rework is overdue for a lot of classes, there's too many weapons that are barely used or can only be used in very small niches (like staff for guardian, most warhorn skills are only used due to having some mobility enhancement, and although i don't have access to metrics, i'll bet that they're dropped in use a lot since PoF because mounts made them less relevant.

As for ele in particular. It relied too much in the RNG big target aoes to be relevant, after those were (rightfully) reworked, it became a bit less relevant in PvE, although still in top tier. The problem is that kinda like Condi Engineer, it relies on a more or less complicated rotation, which tends to pay off, but for a lot of players it's never going to be the same. It needs a better curve with some builds that are more forgiving.

Elementalist though isn't really the most problematic class, it's still pretty good in PvE and WvW, and honestly PvP is not worth mentioning because overall the whole game mode is broken. Never the less last time i played i saw some pretty good bunker tempest plays coming up, so there's still uses for elementalist.

Ele is a complicated class, some work to make it easier might be a good thing, but it needs to thread a thin line, because any buff has the potential to just make the class broken, since it's already pretty strong.

All in all, i don't think this merits the attention it got, there's classes that need a lot more attention than ele, and this is more that the higher you get the harder the fall, and ele was allowed to reach way too high for way too long.

The overall problem is more with the lack of consistent balance between elite specs and core classes. Like it or not 2/3 of a classe's traits will still be core, most weapons will still come from core, and there will always be core skills. One of the greatest reasons for the problems with balance is the power creep that was allowed into Elite specs to sell them more. Basically the decision to have marketing overpower game play, is coming around and biting us all in the kitten. Also, of course, there's the problem of the lack of enough elites to make a proper checked balance.
Before elite specs every class had a possible build for every role, you could, for the most part, use power and condi builds for dps, every class had a possible healer and or support builds, and most classes could field a tank build (thief and mesmer are probably the only real exceptions). Of course because difficulty was nerfed, and because conditions were useless before the 2014 rework, and since support stats didn't really work before HoT, we didn't really use any of that, but if you removed elite specs, and gave us the current stat sets and game balance, you could really have that going.

The problem is that with elite specs, classes were allowed to specialize much more, and find stronger points that anchor each class. But, apparently, because of marketing and the desire to have Elites as a selling point for expansions, we have been consecutively left in a state that forces most classes to specialize.
A consequence of this is that, because ele was never allowed to specialize, not really, after a small nerf, it can seem to have lost all it's potential, because it never had a defined path.

Personal bias and factual analysis are used to describe the situation , this creates feedbacks and skewed perceptions tend to lead to reality where 2-3 professions dominate in everything and everywhere. Before coming down with any evaluation, you're supposed to take in consideration both the PRO and the CONS...not just one while conveniently forgetting about the other.

I don't know precisely to what you're referring to when you talk about "ele being high" and that now ele players are simply having a childish tantrum for this "small nerf" as described by you.

So may you be talking about pve?....I am not a PvEr but from what I observed there : ele was doing the biggest dmg in a coordinated group and that huge dmg came at the cost of any resemblance of sustain , "kindly" provided by the group, if I remember correctly ele was doing 10k or so dmg more than next class and this apparently was/is considered broken by the community

Putting your personal bias aside ....care to explain why ele should have the same dmg as the next profession, while having none of the sustain? Where is the balance in that?

Talk about personal bias! Maybe the bias is on your court? I don't have any stakes in this, i play all professions, not really playing favourites. Ele is the one i play the least for two factors: Staff ele, which is the most viable build, is too static for my tastes, and i never really liked the "mage" archetype. But i still enjoy the class, and weaver is a fun change. I think it would benefit the class to have specializations that specialize in a single element or a smaller combination of elements (like a earth/fire only lavamancer, or a air/water Stormancer), that would provide the much needed focus, instead of keeping Ele as a jack of all trades.

Also, note that i never said there wasn't an issue, i just said that it was getting more attention than it merits, with classes like necromancer and revenant having a ton of mechanical issues to sort out, and only a couple of gimmicky builds viable.

Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has more than most!
Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find all of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks/

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.
Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.
And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And still with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

If you want all professions to have same level of dmg...they should have also the same level of sustain more or less..this is a sound, logic argument.

Yes it is, and like i said already, in PvP there was only two classes that broke the meta so hard that it became unplayable, and those were Chrono and tempest. Either class could (and still can to a point) be built to be almost invulnerable by sacrificing most of it's damage.

May you be talking about PvP/WvW?..honestly I would be too tired of typing the same arguments again so....maybe you should just tell us how ele is strong and how players are exaggerating for a "small nerf"

I think i've covered all the game types in both my posts. Because you know, i've actually played the game with all classes and don't have horses in any race, which allows me to be objective.
There's numbers above for pve. To an extent those numbers can carry over to WvW. In PVP, like i said before, ele suffers from the lack of upkeep to core weapons, since sPvP builds have revolved mostly around dagger/dagger or dagger/focus. And because those weapons are still in 2012 numbers, like a lot of other weapons, it's normal that ele isn't as viable.

@Quasar.1756 said:
Ok, so let's get to the nitty gritty of things.
What is the "biggest' issue with Elementalists? - and - What can Anet do to satisfy / appease the Elementalist community of GW2?

In reference to WvW

Trying to keep it simple: I feel Anet designed ele to be a difficult class to play and originally balanced that with it being a powerful class. Then they decided, nerf by nerf and step by step, to leave the complicated part in and reduce the powerful part. Now ele has complicated rotations for damage that falls below that of several other easier to play classes, and skill casting that freezes you in place for long periods and achieves just ok damage. In WvW ele can have great condi clear using Ether R, Diamond S, and the linking of Cleansing Water -> Soothing Disruption + Woven Stride and all the many ways to get regen/speed from cantrips and/or weaver traits and utilities but even so you find other classes, mainly necro and mesmer, that can apply conditions much faster than it's possible to remove them. This is a serious lack of balance; a build fully oriented to condi clear at the expense of offensive options should be on par with top condi application in order to provide a fair game.

As a conclusion I'd just say that Anet has been unclear on Tempest/Weaver design.

Make up your mind please... will this be a complicated, versatile, high learning-curve, powerful class, or all the previous without the powerful part?

@ReaverKane.7598 said:
Now answering your question, ele does have a lot of sustain, it just happens to fall out of the beaten path. I haven't played PvP in a while, but last time i did (just after PoF) there were still bunker specs able to hold a scourge and a Spellbreaker by themselves. In fact, there lies the problem with elementalist, it's a jack of all trades, but if you focus on one aspect it is capable of outperforming a lot of other classes in that aspect. Earth provides a lot of defensive options, including the OP obsidian flesh. Water has a lot of heals and regen as well. Air, earth and water all have some soft or hard ccs available as stuns, knock backs, crillples and slow. Etc.

That aside, ele doesn't have the same damage as the next profession, it has more than most!
Look at snowcrows, you'll find elementalist in the second place for large hitbox (after consecutive years of being uncontested in first), and you'll find all of their tested elementalist builds far above the top damaging necromancer build, for example. Their strongest build is above the strongest warrior and mesmer builds for small hitboxes.https://snowcrows.com/benchmarks/

Looking at GW2 Raidar (which is a collection of "regular player" dps), you'll find an elementalist build in the top 10 of each category (including support), again outperforming all necromancer builds even in the condition damage category.
Ele ranks above Ranger, necromancer, mesmer and warrior in power builds. It ranks above Ranger, guardian and necromancer in condition builds.
And this is for "average" players... This even despite the fact that ranger, guardian and necro have much simpler rotations, so it's more common to find an elementalist not doing their optimal rotation than a ranger, guardian and necro. And still with the higher skill threshold it still outperforms the easier classes. If you have played any end-game content you'll see how wide the gap is between a good elementalist player and a bad one. While a bad guardian can still pull it off more or less ok.

Then, there's the thing to consider, basically the most used elementalist builds are evolutions of pretty much the same archetype build being used since the dawn of GW2. It's normal that after a big shake up, people still haven't found the best interactions for the new status quo. So it's probable that those numbers will rise.

Even if we take the SC benchmarks, you can see that they are using huge hitbox so they basically megate the most RNG that comes from Meteor Shower and Lightning Hammer hits, and even with those things negated you are still left with the weapon stat RNG, but okey, lets say that those numbers are 100% accurate even on small hitbox.
Now, as you can see renegade has higher DPS compared to ele, and that is WITHOUT any active condition proc.Mirage is the same, 32k benchmark but in real raids it outperforms elementalist even if not by a lot. And other classes that are under the ele on any kind of hitbox are classes that have a lot of CC(like holo for example) or they have decent group utility(Power Herald with AP,Spb with CCs,Guardians with the ability to give Aegis at certain times...), ele has close to zero CC(only with major DPS loss, while classes like holo have instant access to CC, even part of their rota) and obviously you cant change to water in the middle of your rotation to heal up then continue.
Looking at a class on Raidar is kind of irrelevant because you dont know how many people uploaded logs on certain classes so you dont have a real thing to measure them.
Yes I agree that elementalist was broken at some point but it basically gave up all the things for the damage and became a the most selfish class in raids that is only capable of doing damage, but even doing damage needed some skill because basically if you screwed up your rotation or even just a misclick you ended up in water and you needed 5-6 sec to go for full fire for example.
I understand that necros and reapers want to be part of the meta too, and i know that telling them "play a real class" is very demoralizing, but i think people agree that there is no chance that all the classes will do the same DPS, because there are classes that are just better at doing some things than other, by this i mean, necro/reaper has really good utilitys to keep people alive, the new PoF spec of necro is a really good healer, guardians are doing insane damage compared to what rotation they have + can help the group with CC and surviving. The thing that people - sometimes even 50 LI groups - ask for weaver and holo as DPS, while mostly they will get beginner holo and weaver players who could have been outdamaged by a decent guardian or even reaper(as you can see in Teapot´s video) IS a community problem and not a balance problem.
So weaver was at a good place with the 42k DPS benchmark because numbers like that in real raids never occur because of the constant boon loss/boss movement/health under 90%, and i say again close to NO group utility

For me ever since GW1 Ele has always been the King of AoE. That is what has defined the profession for me. If Ele should be changed, I think this goal should be kept in mind.

That being said I must argue to all the people in this thread complaining about how Ele is not good at anything anymore, now that Thief took the top single target dps spot, that Ele even in it's current state is doing rather well. If you want to talk about professions that actually need reworks just take a look at Revenant or Necro.

@Frozey.8513 said:
For me ever since GW1 Ele has always been the King of AoE. That is what has defined the profession for me. If Ele should be changed, I think this goal should be kept in mind.

That being said I must argue to all the people in this thread complaining about how Ele is not good at anything anymore, now that Thief took the top single target dps spot, that Ele even in it's current state is doing rather well. If you want to talk about professions that actually need reworks just take a look at Revenant or Necro.

Revenant is doing pretty well in PvP, PvE and WvW no need to rework it when it's still good.. Necro is only good at PvP and WvW just needs a little bit more in PvE.. no need to rework that either